This bill mandates regular, evidence-based reviews of federal agency rules, requires annual reporting on small business impact, and imposes immediate enforcement halts for non-compliance with review schedules.
David Schweikert
Representative
AZ-1
The RESTART SUNSET Act of 2025 modernizes federal agency rule review by establishing a new ten-year cycle for evaluating existing and future regulations. This legislation requires agencies to annually report on rules that do not significantly impact small businesses. Crucially, the bill mandates that courts immediately halt the enforcement of any rule that an agency has failed to review according to the new periodic schedule.
New RESTART SUNSET Act Mandates Rule Review Every 10 Years—Or Agencies Lose Enforcement Power Immediately
This bill, officially known as the Regulatory Evidence-based Standards for Thorough Accountability and Reassuring Tests—Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely Act of 2025 (or just the RESTART SUNSET Act of 2025), is all about forcing federal agencies to clean out their regulatory closets on a strict schedule. Essentially, it overhauls how agencies must review their existing rules, setting a hard ten-year expiration clock on regulations that aren't periodically checked.
The New Regulatory Clock
If you’re juggling a business or just trying to keep up with federal compliance, this is a big deal. The bill sets a new, firm deadline for agencies to review their rules. For every rule already on the books when the RESTART SUNSET Act becomes law, the agency has ten years from that date to review it. For any new rule finalized after this Act passes, the agency gets ten years from the finalization date to review that rule. This replaces the old, more complicated system that required agencies to publish a specific, detailed review plan within 180 days of the law taking effect. That immediate pressure is gone, replaced by a longer, but very strict, deadline.
Accountability Gets Teeth: The Nuclear Option
Here is the part that will get the attention of every agency lawyer and every regulated industry: the consequences for missing the review deadline just got nuclear. The bill tightens up Section 611(a) of title 5, U.S. Code, which deals with judicial review. If a court finds that an agency failed to conduct the required ten-year periodic review for a specific rule, the court must issue an order stopping that rule from being enforced. No ifs, ands, or buts. This means a procedural mistake—missing a review deadline—can instantly invalidate a regulation.
Think about what this means in the real world. Say the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) misses the ten-year review deadline for a rule governing certain chemical emissions. An industry group challenging the rule could take the EPA to court, and if the court confirms the review was missed, the emission limits could be immediately halted. This doesn't just affect the agency; it affects the air quality for people living near the plant until the agency conducts the review and the rule is reinstated. The risk here is that a minor administrative slip-up could lead to regulatory chaos, creating immediate, unplanned gaps in safety, environmental, or financial protections.
Reporting on Small Business Impact
The Act also adds a new annual chore for agencies: transparency on small business impact. Every year, agencies must publish a list in the Federal Register detailing which rules they determined don't have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small businesses. They also have to explain how they reached that conclusion. This aims to increase scrutiny on how agencies decide which regulations are exempt from deeper small business analysis. For small business owners, this new requirement offers a clearer window into how agencies are classifying rules that affect their bottom line, potentially making it easier to challenge those classifications if they feel they were unfairly exempted.